Space Junk Accident!

[henryrasia]

So, after persistent debris were added to the game I could stop thinking: Wouldn't it be funny to hit one of them?

So the challenge is this: Launch a rocket and hit it with already orbiting debris. As simple as that!

Please post screenshots if you did it. Extra points if you did not rendezvouzed to accomplish it.

Good luck!

Edited September 15, 2012 by henryrasia

[Giggleplex777]

That's easy, just crash into your decoupled orbital maneuver stage.

[Mindofscience3]

I was launching a rocket and a part hit the rocket, taking out two of it's engines, thus making it flip over and disintegrate.

[Hillstache]

... and hit it with already orbiting debris ...

I think the 'already orbiting debris' is key here, not something you just orbited with your launch. I'm willing to wager this is so hard it'll be near impossible, but fun to try!

[supermichael777]

i think al you would have to do is establish two opposing orbits for your rockets.(clockwise and counter clockwise)

[Nibb31]

Basically, it's a rendez-vous and you just ram into the debris instead of docking.

[Hillstache]

i think al you would have to do is establish two opposing orbits for your rockets.(clockwise and counter clockwise)

I bet if you tried this (and you should) you'd find that even if it looks like they're very close on the map view, they won't be very close in practice. Space is big!

[VincentLaw]

It's time to junk up space. Here is Jeb, Bill, and Bob in their orbital junk deployer. This junk is retrograde equatorial. The objective is to increase my chances of slamming into junk without intentional rendezvous. One trip deploys 204 pieces of junk.

Edit: turns out that much debris lags my computer too much to fly even when it's on rails.

Edited September 15, 2012 by VincentLaw

[ddavis425]

I wish I had known about this challenge earlier, some debris zoomed past my rocket during ascent at less than 300m just a few minutes ago.

[henryrasia]

Junk deployer... hehehe... so Kerbal...

FOR SCIENCE!

[Alex6511]

Just earlier today I had a ship ripped apart by 100+ decouplers I left in orbit after a failed experiment, I wish I had known it would happen so I could record it, but sadly I did not

Would have been awesome for this challenge.

[Mindofscience3]

As I said previously, this inadvertently happened to me when testing an inter-planetary rocket for 0.17. Launched it and some junk took out two of the five engines, leading to catastrophic failure and stuff. I was all like wtf just happened to my ship and I blamed the kraken prematurely. No pics (sorry) but I can say it has happened.

[MaverickSawyer]

I'll take this on. One question, though: Do BOTH parts need to be in orbit, or can the interceptor be on a suborbital path?

[TalonX273]

MechJeb. Rendezvous Module. Time Launch with Rendezvous. When close, ram your ship into debris. Done. (Unless mods are banned and/or the debris has to hit the ship and not the other way around.)

[tijn433]

can you upload the .craft file?

[Excalibur]

I nearly managed to do this a few months ago as part of the Ultimate Orbital Intercept challenge. Can't find it now, think it got lost during the forum move. Here's a pretty lame YouTube video I made of the attempts.

[Vaisman]

I'm successfuly intercept debris on low polar orbit, no direct hit, but it was shoot down by laser. I have stage on inclined elliptical orbit and i think i will destroy it too

music - simply online radio

Really not so easy directly hit orbital target. If target and interceptor have similar orbites, they have similar orbital velocities, this good for approach and docking and not so good for attack .

Jink deployer - amazing!

[Excalibur]

Really not so easy directly hit orbital target. If target and interceptor have similar orbites, they have similar orbital velocities, this good for approach and docking and not so good for attack .

That's why I used two launches and two headings; one launched east and the other west. Used MechJeb to set into reasonably accurate orbits then trimmed them down with RCS burns. Getting them within a couple of hundred metres isn't actually too difficult if you have a little patience, it's the actual collision that causes a pain. Finding the closest approach requires analysing video frame-by-frame since the closing speeds involved are so high. Fun challenge though!

[sporkafife]

Are we allowed to use mechjeb to rendezvous with the debris before crashing into it?

[Jason Patterson]

I'm finding the hardest part of this challenge to be getting my computer to not fall to pieces after it passes through a swarm of 50 or so bits of debris at less than 1 km. It runs smoothly up to the last second, then ZAP, the whole thing dies. It gets so laggy that the game completely quits responding and I have to control-alt-delete out of it to get anything to work. I think I'm going to try putting a single large object in orbit and see whether that helps the situation.

ETA: A large target caused fewer problems, but the close approaches seem to devour system resources, and they don't release them after the close approach is finished. Basically, it gets worse and worse as the number of close passes gets greater and greater. I just had a close approach that was insane, roughly 100m between two full sized ships.

Edited September 17, 2012 by Jason Patterson

[MaverickSawyer]

I just had a jeb-worthty idea: build a large spacecraft from wings on orbit.